Friday, August 21, 2015

How to discover great (?) music - What I am reading 8/21/2015

These days, most of my music discovery tends to come from Spotify's much improved recommendations—which, once you've built up a good stack of listening history to work from, is rather good—as well as indulging my obsession with vinyl by picking up records from second-hand shops and flea markets "like a hipster," as my esteemed colleague Sam Machkovech put it. Playing guitar skews what I tend to buy too, because I'm often after inspiration for licks, whether that's from modern metal or old jazz records filled with sweet trumpet legato passages.

I guess that works - if you are a mindless drone willing to have your taste dictated to you by a soulless machine. Being a musical connoisseur (see my blogger and google plus playlists) I find my music from tv commercials, movie trailers, and occasionally on this magic box in my car, where people much smarter than myself can tell me what I should be listening to. Example;

Discovered via the good people who make Diet Coke commercials. Nuff Said.

Because Apple was “disruptive,” anything deemed disruptive now somehow
borrows from Apple’s cachet. “Disruption” has become another meaningless
buzzword appropriated by overzealous cheerleaders of the
entrepreneurial clique they aspire to someday belong to. And look… every
once in a while, someone does come up with a really cool and
radical game-changing idea: Vaccines, the motorcar, radio, television,
HBO, the internet, laptops, smart phones, Netflix, carbon fiber
bicycles, drought-resistant corn, overpriced laptops that don’t burn
your thighs in crowded coffee shops… Most of the time though,
“disruption” isn’t that. It’s a mirage. It’s a case of The Emperor’s New Clothes,
episode twenty-seven thousand, and the same army of early first-adopter
fanboys that also claimed that Google Plus and Quora and Jelly were
going to revolutionize everything have now jumped on the next desperate
bandwagon. What will it be next week? Your guess is as good as mine.

...

Could taxi companies stand to get better at using tech (like they do in Bogotá, Colombia)? Sure. But you aren’t talking about helping them do that, are you. You aren’t lauding a company that set out to bring cab companies into the 21st century.
What you’re doing is lionizing the ticket-scalpers of the hired car
industry just because they use a popular app. When you do that, you
aren’t praying to the altar of progress or even tech Darwinism. You’re
praying to the altar of “disruption.” It doesn’t matter how chaotic or
damaging it may be as long as it’s disruptive. You’ve just jumped on the latest tech bandwagon without bothering to look at the big picture. Again.
Which is to say that you’ve fallen for the latest hype bubble, the
latest bit of messaging, the latest round of investment-driving
marketing. You’re just parroting PR copy without questioning its
validity in the real world.

I have tried to express these same thoughs a number of times but Olivier Blanchard, whoever they are does it much much better, albiet in a very very long post. Defense One - Why Germany’s Cybersecurity Law Isn’t Working -Essentially, as I read it, the law is a bunch of compromises no one is happy with that was enacted solely to show that the government was "doing something". Those types of regulation never work out and always become overburdensome.

About Me

53 year old white male oozing privilege and advantage, if you find that sort of thing sexy. But, I care about the less fortunate if you don't. Either way I'm an idiot so take it all with a grain of salt.